>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. With COVID-19 hitting, organizations really had to focus on business resiliency, and we've got two great guests here to talk about that topic. Bob Bender's the chief technology officer at Founders Federal Credit Union. And he's joined by Jim Shook, who is the director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the CUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks, Dave, great to see you, thank you. So, Bob, let's start with you, give us a little bit of background on Founders and your role. >> Founders Federal Credit Union is a financial institution that has about 225,000 members, serving them in 30 different locations, located in the Carolinas. I serve as chief technology officer bringing in the latest technology and cyber resilient direction for the company. >> Great. And Jim, talk about your role. Is this a new role that was precipitated by COVID or was this something that Dell has had for a while? Certainly relevant. >> It's actually been around for a while, Dave. The organization invested in this space going back about five years, I founded the cyber security and compliance practice. So really, my role is most of the time in the field with our customers, helping them to understand and solve their issues around the cyber resilience and cyber recovery field that we're talking about. But I also, to do that properly, spend a lot of time with organizations that are interested in that space. So it could be with an advisory partner, could be the FBI, might be a regulator, a particular group like Sheltered Harbor that we've worked with frequently. So it's just really, as you point out, taken off first with ransomware a couple of years ago, and then with the recent challenges from work from home in COVID. So we're really helping out a lot of our customers right now. >> Bob, I've talked privately to a number of CIOs and CSOs and many have said to me that when COVID hit that their business continuance was really much too (voice cuts out) Now, you guys actually started your journey way back in 2017. I wonder if you could take us back a few years and what were the trends that you were seeing that precipitated you to go on this journey? >> Well, I think we actually saw the malware, the horizon there. And I'll take you back a little further 'cause I just love that story is, when we looked at the relationship of Dell EMC, we talked to the 1% of the 1%, who is protecting their environment, their data capital, the new critical asset in our environment. And Dell EMC was the top of the line every time. When we looked at the environment and what it required, to put our assets under protection, again, we turned to Dell EMC and said, where do we need to go here? You look at this Mecklenburg County, you look at the city of Atlanta, you look at Boeing and I hate to use the examples, but some very large companies, some really experienced companies were susceptible to this malware attacks that we just knew ourself it was going to change us. So the horizon was moving fast and we had to as well. >> Well, you were in a highly regulated industry as well. How did that factor into the move? Well, you're exactly right. We had on our budget, our capital budget horizon, to do an air gap solution. We were looking at that. So the regulatory requirements were requiring that, the auditors were in every day talking about that. And we just kept framing that in what we were going to do in that environment. We wanted to make sure as we did this purpose built data bunker, that we looked at everything, talk to the experts, whether that was federal state regulation. You mentioned Sheltered Harbor, there's GDPR. All these things are changing how are we going to be able to sustain a forward look as we stand this environment up. And we also stood up a cyber security operations center. So we felt very confident in our Runbooks, in our incident response, that you would think that we would be ready to execute. I'll share with you that we reached out every which way and a friend called me and was actually in a live ransomware event and asked if I wanted to come on to their site to help them through that incident. We had some expertise on our staff that they did not possess at that time. So going into that environment, spending 30 hours of the last 72 hours of an attack we came back changed. We came back changed and went to our board and our executives and said, "We thought we knew what we were doing." But when you see the need to change from one to 10 servers recovery to 300 in 72 hours, we just realized that we had to change our plan. We turned to the investment we had already made and what we had looked at for some time, and said, "Dell EMC, we're ready to look at that "PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution. "How can you stand this up very quickly?" >> So, Jim, Bob was saying that he looked at the 1% of the 1%, so these guys are early adopters, but anything you can add to that discussion in terms of what you saw precipitate the activity, let's go pre-COVID, certainly ransomware was part of that. Was that the big catalyst that you saw? >> It really was. So when we started the practice, it was following up on the Sony Pictures attack, which only hit Sony in that. But it was unique in that it was trying to destroy an organization as opposed to just steal their data. So we had financial industry really leading the way, the regulators in the financial industry saying, "Gosh, these attacks could happen here "and they would be devastating." So they led the way. And as our practice continued, 2016 became the year of ransomware and became more prevalent, with the attackers getting more sophisticated and being able to monetize their efforts more completely with things like cryptocurrencies. And so as we come around and start talking to Bob, he still was well ahead of the game. People were talking about these issues, starting to grow concerned, but didn't really understand what to do. And Dave, I know we'll get to this a little bit later, but even today, there's quite a bit of disconnect, many times between the business, understanding the risks of the business and then the technology, which really is the business now, but making those pieces fit together and understanding where you need to improve to secure against these risks is a difficult process. >> Well, I think I'd love to come back to Bob and try to understand how you pitch this to the board, if you will, how you made the business case. To Jim's point, the adversaries are highly capable. It's a lucrative business. I always talk to my kids about ROI numerator and denominator. If you can raise the denominator, that's going to lower the value. And that's the business that you're in is making it less attractive for the bad guys. But how did you present this to the board? Was it a board level discussion? >> It was, exactly. We brought Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution to them and said, not only you're experiencing and seeing in the news daily, these attacks in our regions, but we have actually gone out into an environment and watch that attack play out. Not only that is when we stepped away, and we ran through some tabletops with them and we stepped away. And we said, "Are you okay? "Do you know how it got in? "Are you prepared to protect now and detect that again?" Within 30 days, they were hit again by the same ransomware attacks and hackers. So I hate to say this, but I probably fast forwarded on the business case and in the environment, the horizon around me, players, they made my case for me. So I really appreciated that top down approach. The board invested, the executive invested, they understood what was at risk. They understood that you don't have weeks to recover in the financial institution. You're dealing with hundreds of thousand transactions per second so it made my case. We had studied, we had talked to the experts. We knew what we wanted. We went to Dell EMC and said, "I have six months and here's my spend." And that's from equipment hitting our CoLOS and our data centers, standing it up, standing up the Runbooks and it's fully executed. And I wanted an environment that was not only holistic. We built it out to cover all of our data and that I could stand up the data center within that environment. I didn't need another backup solution. I needed a cyber recovery environment, a lifestyle change, if you would say. It's got to be different than your BCP/DR. While it inherits some of those relationships, we fund it with employees separately. We treated the incident response separately, and it is really benefited. And I think we've really grown. And we continue to stress that to educate ourselves not only at the board level, but a bottom up approach as well with the employees. 'cause they're a part of that human firewall as well. >> I think you've seen this where a lot of organizations, they do a checkbox on backup or as I was saying before, DR. But then in this world of digital, when a problem hits, it's like, "Oh-oh, we're not ready." So I wonder Jim, if we can get into this solution that Bob has been talking about the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, there's a mouthful there. You got the power branding going on. What is that all about? Talk to us about the tech that's behind this. >> It's something that we've developed over time and really added to in our capability. So at its core, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is going to protect your most critical data and applications so that if there is a cyber attack, a ransomware or destructive attack, they're safe from that attack. And you can take that data and recover the most important components of the business. And to do that, we do a number of things, Dave. The solution itself takes care of all these things. But number one is we isolate the data so that you can't get there from here. If you're a bad actor, even an insider, you can't get to the data because of how we've architected. And so we'll use that to update the critical applications and data. Then we'll lock that data down. People will use terms like immutability or retention lock. So we'll lock it down in that isolated environment, and then we'll analyze it. So it's one thing to be able to protect the data with the solution, it's another, to be able to say that what I have here in my data vault, in my air gapped isolated environment is clean. It's good data. And if there was an attack, I can use that to recover. And then of course over time, we've built out all the capabilities. We've made it easier to deploy, easier to manage. We have very sophisticated services for organizations that need them. And then we can do a much lighter touch for organizations that have a lot of their built in capabilities. At its core, it's a recover capability so that if there was an attack that was unfortunately successful, you don't lose your business. You're not at the mercy of the criminals to pay the ransom. You have this data and you can recover it. >> So Bob, talk to us about your objectives going into this. It's more than a project. It really is a transformation of your resiliency infrastructure, I'll call it. What were your objectives going in? A lot of companies are reacting, and it's like, you don't have time to really think. So what are the objectives? How long did it take? Paint a picture of the project and what it looked like, some of the high level milestones that you were able to achieve. >> Well, I think several times Dell EMC was able to talk us off the edge, where it really got complicated. The Foundation Services is just one of your more difficult conversations, one of the top three, definitely, patch management, notification, and how you're going to rehydrate that data, keeping that window very small to reduce that risk almost completely as you move. I think other area this apply is that we really wanted to understand our data. And I think we're on a road to achieving that. It was important that if we were going to put it into the vault, it had a purpose. And if we weren't going to put it in a vault, let's see why would we choose to do that? Why would we have this data? Why would we have this laying around? Because that's a story of our members, 225 stories. So their ability to move into financial security, that story is now ours to protect. Not only do we want to serve you in the services and the industry and make sure you achieve what you're trying to, but now we have that story about you that we have to protect just as passionately. And we had that. I think that was two of the biggest things. I think the third is that we wanted to make sure we could be successful moving forward. And I'll share with you that in the history of the credit union, we achieved one of the biggest projects here, in the last two years. That umbrella of the Cyber Recovery solution protection was immediate. We plugged in a significant project of our data capital and it's automatically covered. So I take that out of the vendor of responsibility, which is very difficult to validate, to hold accountable sometimes. And it comes back under our control into this purpose built data security and cyber resilient, business strategy. That's a business strategy for us is to maintain that presence. So everything new, we feel that we're sized, there's not going to be a rip and replace, a huge architectural change because we did have this as an objective at the very beginning. >> Tim, when you go into a project like this, what do you tell customers in terms of things that they really should be focused on to have a successful outcome? >> I'm going to say first that not everybody has a Bob Bender. So we have a lot of these conversations where we have to really start from the beginning and work through it with our customers. If you approach this the right way, it's really about the business. So what are the key processes for your business? It can be different from a bank than from a hospital than from a school point. So what are the key things that you do? And then what's the tech that supports that and underlies those processes? That's what we want to get into the vault. So we'll have those conversations early on. I think we have to help a lot of organizations through the risks too. So understand the risk landscape, why doing one or two little things aren't really going to protect you from the full spectrum of attackers. And then the third piece really is, where do we start? How do we get moving on this process? How do we get victory so that the board can understand and the business can understand, and we can continue to progress along the way? So it's always a bit of a journey, but getting that first step and getting some understanding there on the threat landscape, along with why we're doing this is very important. >> So, Bob, what about any speed bumps that you encountered? What were some of those? No project is ever perfect. What'd you run into? How'd you deal with it? >> Well, I would say the Foundation Services were major part of our time. So it really helped for Dell EMC to come and explain to us and look at that perimeter and how our data is brought into that and size that for us and make sure it's sustainable. So that is definitely, could be a speed bump that we had to overcome. But today, because of those lifts, those efforts invested the Runbooks, the increase in new products, new data as our business organically grows is a non-event. It's very plug and play and that's what we wanted from the start. Again, you go back to that conversation at 1% of the 1%, it's saying, who protects you? We followed that. We stayed with the partner we trusted, the horizon holistically has come back and paid for itself again and again. So speed bumps, we're just enjoying that we were early adapters. I don't want to throw anybody out there, but you look about two weeks ago, there was a major announcement about an attack that was successful. They got them with ransomware and the company paid the ransom. But it wasn't for the ransomware, it was for the data they stole so that they would delete it. That's again, why we wanted this environment is we needed time to react in the case that these malwares are growing much faster than we're capable of understanding how they're attacking. Now it's one, two punch, where's it going to be? Where is it going to end? We're not going to likely be patient zero, but we're also not going to have to be up at night worrying that there's a new strain out there. We have a little time now that we have this secure environment that we know has that air gap solution that was built with the regulatory consideration, with the legal considerations, with the data capital, with the review of malware and such. You can go back in time and say, "Scan to see if I have a problem. So again, the partnership is while we focus on our business, they're focusing on the strategy for the future. And that's what we need. We can't be in both places at once. >> How long did the project take from the point of which you agreed, signed the contract to where you felt like you were getting value out of the solution? >> Six months. >> Really? >> We were adamant. I'd put it off for a year and a half, that's two budget cycles basically is what it felt. And then I had to come back and ask for that money back because we felt so passionate that our data, our critical data didn't need to be at that risk any longer. So it was a very tight timeline. And again, product on prem within six months. And it was a lot of things going on there. So I just wasn't idle during that time. I was having a conversation with Dell EMC about our relationship and our contracts. Let's build that cyber resilience into the contract. Now we've got this, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery environment, let's build it here where you also agree to bring on extra hardware or product if I need that. Let's talk about me being on a technology advisory panel So I can tell you where the pricing of the regulations are going, so you can start to build that in. Let's talk about the executive board reporting of your products and how that can enable us. We're not just talking about cyber and protecting your data. We're talking about back then 60% of your keep the lights on IT person will spend with auditors, talking about how we were failing. This product helped us get ahead of that to now where we're data analytic. We're just analysts that can come back to the business table and say, "We can stand that up very quickly." Not only because of the hardware and the platform solution we have, but it is now covered with a cyber resilience of the the cyber security recovery platform. >> I want to ask you about analytics. Do you feel as though you've been able to go from what is generally viewed as a reactive mode into something that is more anticipatory or proactive using analytics? >> Well, I definitely do. We pull analytics daily and sometimes hourly to make sure we're achieving our KPIs. And looking at the KRIs, we do risk assessments from the industry to make sure if our controls layer of defenses are there, that they will still work what we stood up three years ago. So I definitely think we've gone from an ad hoc rip and replace approach to transformation into a more of a threat hunting type of approach. So our cyber security operation center, for us, is very advanced and is always looking for opportunities not only to improve, to do self-assessments, but we're very active. We're monetizing that with a CUSO arm of the credit union to go out and help others where we're successful, others that may not have that staff. It's very rewarding for us. And I hate to say it sometimes it's at their expense of being in-evolved in the event of a ransomware attack or a malware event. We learned so much the gaps we have, that we could take this back, create Runbooks and make the industry stronger against these types of attacks. >> Well, so Jim, you said earlier, not every company has a Bob Bender. How common is it that you're able to see customers go from that reactive mode into one that is proactive? Is that rare or is it increasingly common? It can't be a 100%, but what are you seeing as trends? >> It's more common now. You think of, again, back to Bob, that's three plus years ago, and he's been a tireless supporter and tireless worker in his industry and in his community, in the cyber area. And efforts like those of Bob's have helped so many other organizations I think, understand the risks and take further action. I think too, Bob talks about some of the challenges with getting started in that three year timeframe, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery has become more productized, our practice is more mature. We have more people, more help. We're still doing things out there that nobody else is touching. And so we've made it easier for organizations that have an interest in this area, to deploy and deploy quickly and to get quick value from their projects. So I think between that some of the ease of use, and then also there's more understanding, I think, of what the bad actors can do and those threats. This isn't about somebody maybe having an outage for a couple of hours. This is about the very existence of a business being threatened. That if you're attacked, you might not come back from it. And there've been some significant example that you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars. So as that awareness has grown, more and more people have come on board and been able to leverage learnings from people like Bob who started much earlier. >> Well, I can see the CFO saying, "Okay, I get it. "I have no choice where we're going to be attacked. "We know that, I got to buy the insurance. You got me." But I can see the CFO saying, "Is there any way we can "get additional value out of this? "Can we use it to improve our processes and cut our costs? "Can we monetize this in some way?" Bob, what's the reality there? Are you able to find other sources of value beyond just an insurance policy? >> Definitely, Dave you're exactly right. We're able to go out there and take these Runbooks and really start to educate what cyber resilience means and what air gap means, what are you required to do, and then what is your responsibility to do it. When you take these exercises that are offered and you go through them, and then you change that perspective and go through a live event with other folks that see that after 60 hours of folks being up straight, it really changes your view to understand that there's no finish line here. We're always going to be trying to improve the product and why not pick somebody that you're comfortable with and you trust. And I think that's the biggest win we have from this is that was a Dell EMC partnership with us. It is very comfortable fit. We moved from backup and recovery into cyber resilience and cybersecurity as a business strategy with that partner, with our partner Dell, and it hasn't failed us. It's a very comforting. We're talking about quality of life for the employee. You hear that, keep the lights on. And they've really turned into professionals to really understand what security means differently today and what that quality of data is. Reports, aren't just reports, they're data capital. The new currency today of the value we bring. So how are we going to use that? How are we going to monetize that? It's changing. And then I hate to jump ahead, but we had our perimeters at 1% of our workforce remote and all of a sudden COVID-19 takes on a different challenge. We thought we were doing really good and next, we had to move 50% of our employees out in five days. And because of that Dell EMC, holistic approach, we were protected every step of the way. We didn't lose any time saying, we bought the wrong control, the wrong hardware, the wrong software. It was a very comfortable approach. The Runbooks held us, our security posture stayed solid. It's been a very rewarding. >> Well, Bob, that was my next question, actually is because you've started the journey. >> Sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. Because you started the journey early, were you able to respond to COVID in a more fast sell manner? it sounds like you just went right in. But there's nuance there, because you've got now 50% or more of the workforce working at home, you got endpoint security to worry about. You got identity access management, and it sounds like you were, "No problem. "We've got this covered." Am I getting that right? >> You're exactly right, Dave. We test our endpoints daily. We make sure that we understand what residue of data is where. And when we saw that employee shift to a safe environment, our most consideration at that time, we felt very comfortable that the controls we had in place, again, Dell and their business partners who we are going to hold true and be solid. And we test those metrics daily. I get reports back telling me, what's missing in patch management, what's missing in a backup. I'll go back to keeping BCP and cyber security separate. In the vault, we take approach of recovery and systems daily. And now that goes from maybe a 2% testing rate almost to 100% annually. So again, to your point, COVID was a real setback. We just executed the same Runbooks we had been maturing all along. So it was very comfortable for employees and it was very comfortable for our IT structure. We did not feel any service delays or outages because of that. In a day, when you have to produce that data, secure that data, every minute of every day of every year, it's very comforting to know it's going to happen. You don't push that button and nothing happens. It's executed as planned. >> Jim, did you see a huge spike in demand for your services as a result of COVID and how did you handle it? You guys got a zillion customers, how did you respond and make sure that you were taking care of everybody? >> We really did see a big spike, Dave. I think there were a couple of things going on. As Bob points out, the security posture changes very quickly when you're sending people to work from home or people remotely, you've expanded or obliterated your parameter, you're not ready for it. And so security becomes even more important and more top of mind. So with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we can go in and we can protect those most critical applications. So organizations are really looking at their full security posture. What can we do better to detect and protect against these threats? And that's really important. For us, we're focusing on what happens when those fail? And with that extension and people going home, and then the threat actors getting even more active, the possibilities of those failures become more possible and the risks are just in front of everybody. So I think it was a combination of all of those things. Many, many customers came to us very quickly and said, "Tell us more about what you're doing here. "How does it fit into our infrastructure? "What does it protect us against? "How quickly can we deploy?" And so there has been a huge uptake in interest. And we're fortunate in that, as you pointed out early on, Dave, we invested early here. I'm five years into the practice. We've got a lot of people, very mature, very sophisticated in this area, a lot of passion among our team. And we can go take care of all those customers. >> Bob, if you had a mulligan, thinking about this project, what would you do differently if you had a chance to do it over? >> I think I would start earlier. I think that was probably the biggest thing I regret in that realizing you need to understand that you may not have the time you think you do. And luckily, we came to our senses, we executed and I got to say it was with common sense, comfortable products that we already understood. We didn't have to learn a whole new game plan. I don't worry about that. I don't worry about the sizing of the product 'cause we did it, I feel correctly going in and it fits us as we move forward. And we're growing at an increased rate that we may not expect. It's plug and play. Again, I would just say, stay involved, get involved, know that what we know today about malware and these attacks are only going to get more complicated. And that's where I need to spend my time, my group become experts there. Why I really cherish the Dell EMC relationship is from the very beginning, they've always been very passionate on delivering products that recover and protect and now are cyber resilient. I don't have to challenge that, you pay for what you get for. And I just got to say, I don't think there's much other than I would have started earlier. So start today, don't put it off. >> So you said earlier though, you're never done, you never are, in this industry. So what's your roadmap look like? Where do you want to go from here with this capability? >> I definitely want to keep educating my staff, keep training them, keep working with Dell. Again, I tell you they're such forward thinking as a company. They saved me that investment. So if you're looking at part of the investment, it's got to be, are you with a partner that's forward thinking? So we definitely want to mature this, challenge it, keep challenging, keep working with Dell and their products to deliver more. Again, we go to the federal and state regulatory requirements. You go to the Sheltered Harbor, the ACET testing from the NCUA regulators, just software asset management. You can keep on going down the line. This product, I hate to say it, it's like the iPhone. You think about how many products the iPhone has now made not relevant. I don't even own a flashlight, I don't think. This is what the Dell product line brings to me is that I can trust they're going to keep me relevant so I can stay at the business table and design products that help our members today. >> Jim, how about from Dell's perspective, the roadmap, without giving away any confidential information, where do you want to take this? We talk about air gaps. I remember watching that documentary Zero Days and hearing them say, "We got through an air gap. "No problem." So analytics obviously plays a role in this machine intelligence, machine learning, AI. Where does Dell want to take this capability? Where do you see that going? >> We've got some things in mind and then we're always going to listen to our customers and see where the regulations are going to. And thus far, we've been ahead of those with the help of people like Bob. I think where we have a huge advantage, Dave is with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. It's a product. So we've got people who are dedicated to this full time. We have a maturity in the organization, in the field to deliver it and to service it. And having something as a product like that really enables us to have roadmaps and support and things that customers need to really make this effective for them. So as we look out on the product, and thanks for your reminder, I don't want to risk saying anything here I'm going to get in trouble for. We look at things in three paths. One is we want to increase the ability for our customers to consume the product. So they want it in different forms. They might want it in appliances, in the Cloud, virtual, all of those things are things that we've developed and continue to develop. They want more capabilities. So they want the product to do more things. They want it to be more secure, and keeping up. As you mentioned, machine learning with the analytics is a big key for us. Even more mundane things like operational information makes it easier to keep the vault secure and understand what's going on there without having to get into it all the time. So those are really valuable. And then our third point, really, we can't do everything. And so we have great partners, whether they're doing delivery, offering cyber recovery as a service or providing secure capabilities, like our relationship with Unisys. They have a stealth product that is a zero knowledge, zero trust product that helps us to secure some of the connections to the vault. We'll keep iterating on all of those things and being innovative in this space, working with the regulators, doing things. Bob's mentioned a couple of times, Sheltered Harbor. We've been working with them for two years to have our product endorsed to their specification. Something that nobody else is even touching. So we'll continue along all those paths, but really following our customer's lead in addition to maybe going some places that they haven't thought about before. >> It's great guys. I have to fear that when you talk to SecOps pros, you ask them what their biggest challenge is, and they'll say lack of talent, lack of skills. And so this is a great example, Jim, you're mentioning it, you've productized this. This is a great example of a technology company translating, IT labor costs into R&D. And removing those so customers can spend time running their business. Bob and Jim, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Great story. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, Bob. >> All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good morning cube land and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Carl holes, our, he is the supervisor of infrastructure Shumaker loop and Kendrick based in Toledo, Ohio. Thank you so much for coming on the show tomorrow. So tell our viewers first of all a little bit about uh, she make her loop. So Schulich >>is a top 200 law firm in the U S we have seven locations across the country, most of the East coast and we serve as anything from litigation to environmental to legal and things like that. >>Okay. So you and you are the supervisor of infrastructure. >>Yeah, my role there is to make sure anything with plugs and switches keeps working, so. >>All right. And so Carl, tell us a little bit about, you said you've got multiple occasions once that span and to the lawyers tell you everything and how it must be. >>The lawyers definitely have a say in the way things work. We have most of the locations in Florida and the Carolinas and two in Ohio. Okay. >>Um, and you know, with the locations, you know, what are some of the business drivers that you're going on? When I talked to most companies, you know, there's the constant change. Is there M and a happening? Is it growth? What are some of the drivers of your business? >>Oh, for sure it's growth. You know, obviously as time goes on there's more and more cases, more and more legal things have to happen. Lawyers love documents, so we have to store documents, index amend, make sure that they're always available for their use. And then of course, as part of that too, there's, there's legals holds on things, you know, stuff the case that stretches over, you know, five, 10 years. We need to keep that data safe. Yeah. So I would, >>I think that the word compliance is one that you know, all too well. Exactly. Bring us in a little bit to them. Side is, so some of those, you know, what do you have to be concerned about? You know, how many petabytes exabytes of things in years >>I'll have to that. It depends on the kind of case it is and what it involves. Some, some cases, as long as you have the data in some form you're okay. Other cases the data can't change. So we have systems that might be a little older because they, it has to be as it was when we actually had the case come into us. Okay. That's challenging too. So data, when we talked to so many companies, it's, you know, how can I monetize data? How can I do that? Data has to be a slightly different role inside your organization. How, how's that thought of, >> we have to be careful obviously because conflict of interest, you know, we so have to keep data separate in some instances and internally, not everybody can see the same data because there is issues with privacy or hippo or you know, or so on and so forth that they can't see this stuff. So for us, we need to keep it safe more than monetize it. >>So as you said, the lawyers have a, have a big say in how things empower things happen. So how would you describe the approach and mindset of, of Chyulu toward technology and toward cloud-based and new kinds of, to, to store >>and keep data safe? We, our goal is to make sure things are always online. Um, so we kind of tend toward the more, the more tried and true methods of doing things, the bleeding edge doesn't always work for us. So, but we also can't afford to, to lag behind. So we need to find that balance in between somehow to keep things moving, but the same time make sure that things don't go down or offline fraternities. So protecting and backing up your data across a hybrid environment isn't easy. So Ty, and I know you, you are on a panel here at ignite about, uh, backup disasters and how to avoid them. So I'd love to have you talk a little bit about, about how you think about this and then, and how you interview vendors, vendors and decide what's the right solution for your show. >> Every different, I guess a practice inside of law firm has different ways of getting data. They like their programs this way or that way and they're all different. So the hard part for us is how to keep that data always available to them in different systems. So whatever we do has to encompass making sure these all, all these things work, you know, kind of as, as one. So we've used Cohesity to do backups, we've used Xero to do dr mixer always online. >>Okay. And how long have you been using those solutions? I, how did you reach the kind of those decisions? >>Those were brought in? Just as I joined the firm about a year and a half ago. Um, our vendor who we're using is very tight with Cohesity and Xero and said that might be a good idea. And the more I use them, the more I agree with that. And they're all good. >>So you're saying it's your, your CI, your channel partner channel that does, that. They're trusted, they provide your gear, advise you on the software. Because let's be honest, as time goes on, you can't know everything. So you need to somebody that you can trust to bring in and say, Hey, do it this way. Well, yeah, Carl, I mean, I don't know if you caught the day one keynote, but even those of us that watch the industry in DOE, it's, there's no way any of us could keep up at though. So that, that, that's really important. How do you make sure that you know that that's a trusted advisor? You know, what's, what's the kind of the give and take between them? >>I think a lot of that comes down to a gut feeling, right? I you, if you feel slimy when you meet somebody, you know, they don't have your best interests in mind and that's what you want. Not my best interest, but the interest of the firm and of the company. So once you have established those guidelines, you usually can trust what they're saying. And I guess every time you meet them too, you have to reevaluate is this still a good fit? >> So when you comes to backup and recovery, I'd love to hear more about this panel and how you and your colleagues came to conclusions about how here's some, here's some big ones and here's how you can avoid them. So I think for us it was just what worked and what didn't work. You know, we all, all three of us use this stuff day to day. So we found the pitfalls, we found what you should and shouldn't do. And when we share that with the, with the community, we get some good feedback on that. >>So Carl, a year and a half there, any, any specific advice that you'd share? People as to what you've learned? Say I hired pitfalls in there as you know, was it a configuration issue or something went wrong because we know the best intentions and best products out there, so you know, things can get in the way. Yeah, >>definitely. We've learned to keep support clothes. I mean, they're awesome. They know their stuff. There's some things we've had issues with that I wanted to do that it wasn't a good fit or we've ran into some bugs here and there, but they're really responsive and they'll put all the alpha specialists for you and weeks, you know, and things just end up working. >> Alright, so here at the conference, what are some of the conversations that you're having because you are in the legal industry and so not necessarily community college communicating all day with people in the high tech industry. So bring us inside a little, tell us about the conversations you're having, interesting people that you're meeting, things that are sparking your interest. >> It's neat because I've met some people through the panel I was on yesterday and they're asking questions that don't even title legal. You know, they have the same access as we do, but they are just either apply to manufacturing or applied to natural gas or whatever happens to be. Um, and then when you know, meetings from the vendors here, it's interesting too, you know, I'm an illegal mindset now and they say, Hey, what about this? And you go, Oh, that's some game changer. And you know, and all of a sudden you can apply it to your field. >>More sense. Yeah. How about this your first time attending Microsoft ignite? Give us a little bit your impressions, you know, uh, the, the, the good, the bad. And the interesting is it's really >>big. I walked through here Sunday night when when nobody was here. It's like, Oh, this isn't too bad. And then I think I walked 10 miles the first day getting places and it's usually pretty well laid out and unless there's beer or food and everybody kind of goes to it and it's hard to move around. But other than that I think it's pretty cool. So what are the kinds of things you're going to take back? As you said, you are sometimes talking to people who are in a completely different industry with you and they are saying things that spark your interest and spark new ideas. What are the kinds of things you're going to take back to shoe loop when you arrive back in total Toledo, we're trying to look at all these new buzzwords like on new, but like blockchain or AI and how they can help us do our jobs better and serve their attorneys better. Um, is there something that I haven't thought of that blockchain can, can do this >>for us and better than we're doing it now now. So Carl, one of the things we've noticed there, there's a real growth in some of the developer content here as an infrastructure person. And I'm curious your view on that, that that side of the world. >>That is not my strong suit. Obviously I came from a world where that was a big deal and I could learn some things. But as far as my background goes and learning about it, it's kinda over my head. Um, you know, I can get it behind this stuff, talk to automate processes and make things, you know better. But as far as the dev side, I'm kind of going, Hey, no, I know if I get this, but, but there is such a push here for citizens and for citizen developers and to sort of democratize this and say even you can do this, which is awesome and in a way because the more eyes have on something, the better they go. You know I can even if I don't understand something, I can ask the question, Hey, why is this work this way? You go, Oh it shouldn't work this way. >>Let's fix this and and make things better. You know. Anything more about kinda your firm's relationship with Microsoft? So many announcements here. Not, no, not sure if teams has used a in your environment. We are using Skype right now but we have way pushed to go to two teams. So that's going to be a big, big push for us in queue for this year and digging next year and then we're looking at moving to Azure at some point. Getting our stuff up there and making you know to be most effective, faster, better. How do you stay up to date with all of these new announcements and not just here at Microsoft, but even in the larger technology community. You can't stop learning. You can't stop reading. You know? You look at the like the slash dots of the world and you just keep looking at things and some things may make sense. >>Some things I'm like, Oh, that's kind of cool. I'll read it later. All of a sudden it goes, Oh, that's a big idea and we should look at this some more. But again, it's having those trusted people that you know or colleagues that say, Hey, I saw this. I saw that. Take a look at that suit. You think so? I know in your, in your off time, you are an officiant of a number of different sports. I'm curious to hear how you bring what you do as an officiant into your job at shoe loop and the similarities. The differences. In my help desk days, it was a lot easier because I could take the, the end user ratings a lot easier because I will hold nothing personal, but it's neat too. I mean, when you're an official, you have, there's a, there's a way things work. There's a, there's a set of rules you have to follow and, and it, and even anything that's technology based there, it's all logical progression of things. This is the way things work and not they blinders as much, but as much as you just follow the process, which makes this audience here. Great. Well thank you so much Carla, for having me. It was great having you on the show. Thank you guys. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage. Microsoft ignite.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio and health happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for a long time but actually first time on the program also a Boston area native I believe yes Jim and so it's Jim Sullivan who's the CEO of nwn Jim's thanks so much for joining us let's do it's great to be here watching you guys forever and first time and happy to be here so we've got a lot of shared history we both we overlapped a little bit at a company that some people might remember was EMC before it was the largest acquisition in tech history you've worked for a number of companies we've covered here on the cube XIV actifi oh and the like so tell us first you know nwn it's not a company that you know the vast majority of people are going to know of but you know good-sized company been around for a while Waltham based tell us tell us a little bit about what brought you to nwn thanks to yet nwn is a you know solution service provider been around 10 years hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues 1,300 customers and a lot of really incredible you know platform offering service offerings and so was really excited to be able to kind of get involved with the company and begin to look at we could do for the industry and for customers all right yeah you talk about it you know an area that that's transforming greatly I mean tech in general you know we say that the the only constant in industry is change when you talk about services you talk about platforms that means a lot of things to a lot of people maybe explain a little bit that the spaces that end everyone plays in and where some of the core capability of the company are sure so if you look at as you know this a lot of everything for you know digital transformation is around the end-user experience so we all want to have great access to you know voice video you know clean network the ability to kind of have this great experience to collaborate with customers so India nwn really the core offerings unified communications which has really always been a kind of core of the company the network's underpinning those communications along with a contact center collaboration security and so security really wraps around everything and then those are the core areas where we are but the core IP of the company is the platform that can manage all those environment you know as a self-service function that the customers use or that arts contacts and her team can kind of run okay so when I hear that the solutions that you're talking about the the thing that comes kind of front and center in the industry that I've been hearing about it's the CX it's the customer experience you know what is the ultimate end users how are they interacting with as well as the employees themselves you know if you've got people at the contact centers that are running things how are you making their jobs easier so you know how does that play into you know what you're seeing in the market and how nwn you know delivers offerings in that space so everything's really tied together whether you have a device a a phone system everything's gonna be tied into the network and required really high security so the the management platform that we have allows customers to have that ability to provision in a real secure fashion a device that we can kind of deliver and manage the right phone systems that we can also deliver and manage all tied into a really secure Network and it can be anywhere they want it can be you know private cloud hybrid cloud or hosted cloud is how we deliver it today yeah there's the cloud discussion that's going on right now I was at Enterprise Connect earlier this year and you know everything seemed to be you know cloud enable an AI infused underneath from a customer standpoint you know that they can get a little bit overwhelmed with some of the jargon that's get gets thrown out there so help explain a little bit you know what solutions what is nwn build you know how does it fit in with kind of you know big tech companies that they probably have relationships with and debut and has been part of the channel for many of these products there to talk a little bit about that mix overall we're gonna deliver a solution for the customer in those areas right so in a unified communications area or a network area security so and the solutions going to be required you know some hardware you know a lot of services which is our people and then most importantly this management platform which is going to be the management capability the business analytics the knowledge center that kind of pull off from everybody right so our focus is really delivering the solution delivering it you know kind of a solution as a service so the customer has the ability that it's not outsourcing it's not managed services but we're gonna be running the service but they have the ability to self provision interact with pulling all their own analytics all their own data on their own environment so it's a much more interactive relationship than kind of the old-school managed services of the past you know I I like that term solutions as a service because we've learned the the failings of just pure outsourcing it was like oh can I get my mess for Less well no no you don't want your mess what customers need is they need to be able to deploy something today and as the business changes adjust that and you can't have something that you have to throw over the wall and say oh hey can you do this oh yeah we'll get back to you in six months maybe and here's your new bill and how that changes in the cloud era I need to be able to deploy something today and stay flexible to be able to take advantage of new technologies new innovations as they come along how do your offerings help customers stay current and you know drive that innovation adoption right so a huge part of we talk about this in a lot of industries particularly our old kind of infrastructure of days and that everything becoming more software-defined is is really everywhere or cloud offerings really everywhere and with software these changes are happening so fast so the customer gets an environment that's stable and secure deployed and managed by us but as changes happen our team and our kind of best practices capabilities allows to interact with their end users so you kind of drive the adoption which a lot of time it's more getting and training and making sure the new practices sort of happened because the efficiencies gained are huge that's sort of one and then two is is it's beginning to get adopted you're beginning to kind of roll that out across the entire enterprise so the customer gets that end user experience which it helps with employee retention you know really helps with business ROI and ultimately the investments they made are now being used and they're getting what they want so it might be excellent you know lying quality with great business analytics in a secure environment but it goes back down to you know is the network being utilized all the software capabilities being deployed and managed and really what's the business outcome for the customer so these this world is very much less speeds and feeds or technology or all of that versus okay where's the customer stand today and where do they want to bring the business to and what business outcomes they looking to drive the adoption services you know ensures that they get the business outcomes all right Jim you know what what industries what geographies gives a little bit of kind of the scope and breadth of your team right so it's 1,300 customers more than half the customers are really large enterprises you know companies like eversource the other half of the business is sled state local education so Yale University really big customer state of California we manage over 200,000 endpoints over 400 agencies so really some huge scale but it really maps to a great balance in the business of sled and enterprise accounts okay and you talked about cloud you have some of your own data centers how do you play with some of the public cloud and customer environments what's right what's kind of that mix and what are you yeah so so today customers want to have like I don't think they quite care but they want to have fast deployments really agile environments consistent costs really effective and so for us we able to provide that because we can provide private cloud on-premise we can service any public cloud for these deployments and we also have three data centers where we can provide a cloud solution for them or hybrid clouds lifts and really mapping particularly the enterprise accounts as we know they're beginning to learn like all public clouds little scary you know but if you get into a fireman where you can have really a shop that has you know private clouds that delivers a hybrid cloud environment for them much more flexible much more agile for them it's been a perfect scenario where the predominance of our customers are deployed in a cloud scenario managed by us but in their data centers in our cloud as well yeah right I think a really good point their customers are still sorting out where everything goes and you've got to have flexibility to say okay it's not one or the other it's usually more of an and right in helping customers you know move through what I do in there and for us most of these environments are you know really mission-critical applications that are gonna be rolled out whether it's the voice systems which really kind of backing and the underpinning the whole the whole customer experience it might be device as a service so when we kind of talk about end user experience it starts with really the voice that devices it's got to be really secure which is becomes a kind of a compliance issue and a lot of this is all tied together into the network so the the big differentiator for it end WN is the ability that we can have the management portal that really manages all these five environments together into one seamless into one seamless platform that they can pull the data from okay so talked about you've got team you've got technology you've got really important you've got a lot of good customers seems like you have a good relationship nwn is going through a bit of a transformation here since you've been on board just a few months now I've had a chance to look at the website and the biggest thing for me is I'll tell you from the old one to the new one the new one is simpler I really kind of grasped much faster what any of the wnd does so maybe speak a little bit to you know what nwn of today how that's different from how we might have thought of nwn in the past sure nwn been around 10 years as nwn but they've been acquiring companies and really had has incredible employees great customers really loyal customers and big accounts that were strategic too but as we really went through kind of the assessment of what's really resonating with customers we were able to really focus all the offerings down to these five core offerings that we've been talking about and then really have the right investments around all the IP that we've developed and really wanted to put against those five offerings and then have the customer success teams be able to be organized around that so the company has really focused on where 95% of the business was the ability to really put all the wood behind the arrow you know for those environments and for our customers to really focus and that's about a 50 billion dollar market in the u.s. right so that focus area is a big space big opportunity for growth and a lot of it was in the predominance of our 1,300 customers they buy one or two of these offerings from us and now the ability to really expand that but so many of these customers are so happy we're gonna kind of take it in those industries we're in probably about five core industries to really kind of take it to their peer their peer companies and really expanded in that account-based marketing sort of kind of program okay so five specific offerings we've talked about a couple of them already unified communications as a service of course we talked about contact center we touched on device as a service you talked about some of the devices security and advanced technology solutions maybe start with security you know I think one of the you know you know most important topic being discussed I looking back at my career and you know 10 or 15 years ago security was what I would call top of mind bottom of budget all right and today it is often a board level discussion there are lots of dollars lots of investment lots of concern around security so what piece is the security market does nwn playing you know what we're what's good you know what what do you what are you creating and what are you working with the ecosystem and where do we need to go sure enough space so for unified communications for the 80s you know practice around the supporting network and device as a service our security offerings are for the environment right and a lot of it is where there's a lot of tools deployed but customers you know are really okay once something happens an incident happens they have a tool that identifies something that happens but a lot of the security will be really really mapping those environments that they have a secure platform but Incident Response is really where we're gonna really be doubling down on so something's happened in one of those environments what happened and then how do you respond to that that's going to be the big focus of what nwn it's been doing and kind of what will invest more in its really Incident Response okay great advanced technology solutions talk to us a little bit about that so a lot of the core the core expertise in the company for years has been around the network but then that really expanded with doing you know full you hosted unified communication so the company today can deploy any type of networking solutions for customers along with all the connectivity so the bandwidth you know any type of a next generation networks like 5g so all of that really tied together that you have the network you know the right connectivity to kind of get to the the right performance and then mapping it to the SL A's that have to go with the the offerings of unified communications and devices of service because everything's going to be inter intertwined and you think about any like collaboration technologies I mean how many times have we been in a meeting where a collaboration technologies not really working but the performance is not really there it's not that software it's something that was tied beneath that so nwn can really bridge the two together to have that the right networking capability the right connectivity so you're getting the fast connectivity right away of what really matters to the end user experience which is that collaboration system yeah you know we talked a little bit about innovation you know where where are your customers what's exciting you that's helping your customers move forward and you know where are those areas that were still struggling a little bit you know III think back you know I worked in the you know Telecom Unified Communication space you know back in the late 90s and you know by now we were supposed to have the flying cars with the ubiquitous video everywhere and well FaceTime you know and some some things have us there a little bit sure I use my you know my webcam way more than I did five or ten years ago but yeah maybe speak a little bit where were having success and where if we still need to go number one thing for me that I learned of one of the most unique assets that NW and has is the business analytics and data capability right so a lot of these environments have been deployed we've got all these multiple different vironment but what I learned of the nwn capability is we have every piece of data of all those different environments in every customer in every customer environment so we have the ability now with our portal and they've had the ability to do this it's really any type of function that the customer wants to learn more about in kind of an automated fashion that they can self provision this data themselves we have the data so it could be billing capabilities of really what what groups are being built it could be any type of compliance so what type of calls are being made and who's doing calls any type of productivity for call centers of what capabilities we have so I think the the the biggest thing to answer your question is one the nwn capability is all the business data that we have that maps across multiple industries to deliver best practices but people have been to plot deploying networks deploying devices deploying phone systems but never really having the intelligence of what you're gonna do with that data to drive the business forward and so one it's like got to have the end user experience be like that's like table stakes where the end user experience is great but now how the business use the data of how all those systems are working together to really bring forward like okay what business decisions do we make to move forward in terms of what's working what's not working and comes back to driving the right business outcomes alright so a lot a lot of effort in the last few months yeah focus and execution doing the relaunch here let's look forward a little bit Jim as you know six or twelve months from now as we look back what are some of the key KP at KP is how for those of us the outside do we know that nwn is executing and meeting you know where you want the company to go its 100% about customer satisfaction right so it's the as we continue to expand the offerings inside customers and then add new customers will be you know solely how we're going to manage the business and that's really where it's as customers do upgrades with us the the predominance of our customers is long-term contracts so as customers continue to do renewals and add new offerings and kind of new capabilities that we bring to the table and as they tell their peer companies which is people are really excited about being references for us then we'll continue to add more companies into the mix and more more customers and grow the 1302 mm great and you know for for potential customers out there there any of the kind of key things that you would call out that they said oh I've got this issue or I'm looking to do this kind of project I want to make sure to have nwn on my short list I see a couple areas right it's it's everyone is it's a 50 billion dollar market so everyone is dealing with unified communications issues right in terms of what decisions are gonna make were an expert in that space the device is a service you know really like we manage two hundred thousand endpoints with the state of California so that's a device of the service is really a space that not a lot of people are in a lot of people doing devices but really as an end end service not really you know strong you know kind of capability and then the security requirements are for everybody so I think for these solutions than to have the right service people the right network expertise so that that five areas is kind of the core space and I think the biggest thing that I would say to customers is everything's intertwined right so it's like you can have you know one person to talk about one if you don't really tie it all together that's where the challenges and the problems usually kind of come from and we're also really sizable Ike the companies you know you know a lot a lot of large customers but the companies hundreds of millions of dollars with a lot of forty's over the last 10 years yeah so Jim last thing talk about the team in the culture you know talk about what you you want to build on what NW always has and you know are you doing some hiring either here locally in the Boston area or you know in other geographic areas sure so companies Nate you know national company so we'll be hiring sales reps solution engineers nationally and really kind of continue to scale that out the service desk function that we have and really the customer success team is continuing to expand and really supporting the growth of the business and really kind of driving it so those are really the key areas the rest of the company that people are the people and the and the culture of the company are amazing the passion commitment to customer success people have been here a long time and so they have a lot of experience and a lot of kind of patch with the company so a lot of the changes we made all came from within side right so everyone really rallied to be like hey here the things were good at then we want to get great at and that sort of been kind of the big focus and we have really strong presence in in in the Carolinas all over the Northeast California Texas and so we're gonna really look to kind of connect all those geographies together to have one national you know kind of powerhouse player across the country all right Jim Sullivan thank you so much for the updates congratulations on the progress and look forward to watching the continued growth of NW thank great to be here all right and lots more coverage here as always on the cube net on to minimun and thank you for watching the Q

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is special On the Ground of theCUBE here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. We've had the pleasure of knowing the VTUG team for quite awhile back actually, when it was the New England VMUG was when I started attending. When it switched to the VTUG at Gillette Stadium's when we started doing theCUBE there. And happy to bring back to the program first, Chris Harney, who is the one who created this as a true user event. And joining him is his wife Dawn Harney, who we know is behind the scenes organizing all of this event. So, Dawn and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing this community and educational process with all of us. >> Thanks Stu, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, so, Chris, we really want this, it's a celebration. Sixteen years; back in 2003 the number one movie of the year was actually Finding Nemo. Of course we waited a long time for there. It goes without saying that all of us were a little bit younger. And boy, in those days, I started working with VMR in 2002, so that journey of virtualization was real early. There was no cloud talking we had kind of the XSP's and some of the earlier things. But so much has changed, and what I have loved is this journey that the users that are attending here. We're actually here in the Expo hall, and if you look, why are there no people in here right now? Because they are all in the break out sessions understanding what are the skill sets that they need today and tomorrow to help them in their journey; virtualization, cloud, DevOps, all of these changes there. Chris, you started this as a user to help share with your peers, so, we've had you on the program many times, bring us back. >> Yeah, so think back to 2003. There was no way to share information. There's no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups, Meetups, no Game of Thrones. >> We had to go to books and stuff like that. >> Exactly. >> Read the paper. >> So white papers, those were the big deal. You had the Microsoft books that were two inches thick and glossy. >> Yeah, I wonder how many of our younger audience would know the acronym RTFM? Read The Fine Manual please, is what we're doing. Dawn, this event, as I said, we've been at the winter event at Gillette Stadium, you brought in some of the Patriot players we've had the pleasure of interviewing. This Summer event is epic. I know people that come from very long distances to swim in the community, get the information. There's a little bit of lobster at the end of the day. >> There's a lot of lobster at the end of the day. >> So give us the community that you look to help build and foster, and what this event has meant to you over the years. >> For me it's really a place for everybody in the community to come together and share their knowledge with their peers. Something may work for me maybe it will work for you. Let's get together and talk about it. The best way to learn something is from somebody that may have done it, or done it, messed it up, learned something, like to share it with you. So, it really is about working with your peers, learning something from your sponsors and all these companies that you work with everyday. What's new, what's going on. So this is the place to go to get all that. >> Wait, Dawn, I thought you weren't a tech person. >> I'm not a tech person. >> That answer was spot on because one of the things I loved about the virtualization community, is we were all learning in the early days. And it required a little bit of work. There's this theory known as the IKEA effect. Sometimes if you actually help build it a little bit, you actually like it a little bit more. And this community really epitomizes that in the virtualization community and cloud. We've been talking about cloud now for a decade but it's still relatively early days on how this multi-hybrid cloud fits together, how operations are changing, so, Chris, bring us through a little bit of that arc. >> Well, I'll think about it, back in 2003, there was only VMwire. There was only one virtualization platform, if you didn't use VMwire, you were doing bare metal Windows install or Unix install on physical servers. Well, back when we changed, there was Hyper-V, that was coming out, AWS was just coming out, so that's when we kind of made the jump from just being a VMwire user to a virtual technology. So we could talk about the cloud, we could share those experiences and have that same journey together, and hopefully learn and lead, get smarter together as a group, you can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself. >> Yeah, and as we know, Chris, and we've talked about this, the IT industry is never "Hey, give me a clean "sheet of paper and we'll start everything." We know it is additive and all of these things go together, so cloud did not obviate the need for virtualization, so all of these things go together, and how do I make sure as my job doesn't get completely eliminated or, I was talking to somebody who said "If I've been doing the same thing for 10 years, "will I be out of a job?" They said, "Well hopefully you really really like "what you're doing cause if you think "you can keep doing what you're doing, "that is all you will ever be able to do." And I thought that was a very poignant comment. >> Yeah, Matt Broberg's talk this morning about what's your next job going to be, what skillsets do you need to be relevant in 10 years, and it's the same thing, I mean we said the same thing 10, 15 years ago. You can't be a Windows admin anymore, you can't be a VMwire admin anymore, you can't be a cloud admin anymore in five years. >> Yeah, so Dawn, give our audience a little bit of the scope of this event, as I said, I know people that have flown in from the Carolinas, from Colorado, from all over, from California and the like, 16 years of this event, this community is not just New England, it really has had a broad impact. >> Right, and it's huge, people plan their vacations around this, I've had people come from Europe, they fly over here, stay in the state of Maine, they go to L.L. Bean, they do all those things because they plan their vacation, they know they need to be here for the VTUG event, so it's meant a lot, because you do get so many different variety of people, you have the sponsors, you have the end users, you have media, you have bloggers, you have pretty much just everybody comes together to really be that community, so it's meant a lot to me, it's been a long 16 years but it's meant a lot. >> All right, so the question people are asking, this is the final VTUG, so no more winter event at Gillette, this is the final event tonight at Gritty's, so explain to us how that happened. >> It is the final event, 16 years, we're all getting older, it's bittersweet, but we've just realized that it takes a lot of time to put these together, it takes a lot of sponsors, it takes a lot of users, the users continue to come, but unfortunately the sponsors pay for it, and really don't have that following with the sponsors that we used to have, unfortunately. >> There are a lot more events, there are a lot more ways to find customers, so they're going to the meetups and they're doing their own events. >> Yeah, to your opening point Chris, 16 years ago it was much tougher to find sources. Now the challenge we have is there's too many options out there, there are too many events, trust me, I go to too many events, but this one has always been one that we've always looked forward, so please from the community, want to say thank you so much, it has always been one of our favorite things to kick off the year with when we do the winter one, and the summer one, I've made this trip a couple of times, it is a little warm in here, I think brings back to the roots of this event, remember it was four or five years ago it was 110 degrees out, and then you switched to this facility, so of course the air conditioning decides to go out, because we know in IT, sometimes things break. >> Start in the heat, end in the heat. >> So Chris, want to give you the final word for the final VTUG. >> You know, I'm just very proud and happy with this community, it truly is a community, it wasn't us, it wasn't theCUBE, it wasn't the vendors, it was everyone working together to make a community that helped each other out, so thanks to everyone. >> Chris and Dawn, thank you so much, we're happy to be a small piece of this community, and look forward to staying in touch with you in your future endeavors. Thanks so much, I'm Stu Miniman, we have a full day of coverage here, keynote speaker, some of the users that have traveled around, really focusing on the community here at the VTUG Summer Slam, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. 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>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Lousiana, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host this week been Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, we have Rodney Foreman, who's the Vice President of Global Channel sales at Nutanix. Thanks for joining us Rodney. >> Thank you. >> And we've got Deborah Bannworth, who's the Senior Vice President of Alliances and Inside Sales at Sirius, not the radio but the channel partner. >> And you got the last name right, so thank you very much, good to see you. >> Stu: I'm glad I didn't lose that bet. >> Deborah: You practiced well, you practiced well. >> Rodney, let's start with you. You're new to the role, a lot going on in the channel, I definitely noticed when I came to the show this year, the X Ball hall has a whole area of the channel partners. There's obviously been channels since day one from Nutanix, but, you know, big emphasis here at the show, so, tell us what's new and tell us what brought you to Nutanix. >> Yeah, so my background is I ran the cloud channel business at IBM for that middleware channel business for years. I joined Nutanix in January, and since January we've been making a lot of progress. We're evolving and changing our channel program, into a industry leading channel charter, that we can all be proud of and that will make our partners more successful in the market. I'm pleased with the event, we've got a record number of partners here, last count was 1600. We had so many partners that the partner exchange keynote was overflowed, and we had to stop letting people in. The room was overfull and so we made some exciting announcements there. Acknowledged the partners for all the new customers they're bringing Nutanix, helping us grow our market share. All of the success we're having with customers is in large part due to our partners because of successful implementations that our partners are driving. And I'm very very excited to be a part of the Nutanix team, and working with partners like Sirius, who I worked with at IBM, and now we're working together at Nutanix, and driving a lot of success in the market together. >> Great so Deborah, I got to know Sirius some through the virtualization community over the years, so give us a little bit about your background, for those that don't know Sirius, give us kind of-- >> So I've had the privilege, the distinct privilege of being at Sirius for a little over 21 years now, so I've seen a lot of change, internal and external, and my role at Sirius is I have responsibility for all of our partnerships, nationally, as well as inside sales, so a little bit of the two prerogative approaches here at Sirius. We have enjoyed, and I actually look you in the eye and tell you, we have sincerely enjoyed the partnership that we have with Nutanix, because it is just that, it is a partnership. It's a win win, and it's something that started in late 2013 for us, and it was something that our technology community, right, our technical and as well as our architecture folks actually take a look and said HCI could bring a lot of value to our client set, and we entered into that partnership and it has been a phenomenal success for us, hopefully you have seen the same, and we see nothing but growth for both of us. >> And Deborah, for those that don't know tell us what GO is Sirius in, what's kind of the breadth of portfolio that you offer. >> So Sirius today continues to grow, and we are North America basically. >> I like that of the, one of the companies Sirius acquired was Viro. >> Yes, at the Carolinas. >> And they have the Viro (mumbles). >> Great group of guys. >> Great culture, so let's talk about the customer engagement. A lot of customers here, a lot of joint customers, are we to the point that, you know, we're beyond a chicken egg discussion, and customers are coming to Sirius and asking about HCI and Nutanix specifically, or do you guys have to push out the message? >> You know, it's funny, so, if i may be candid, in 2013 I would tell you we were pushing, right? Here's Nutanix, here's what they do, here's what HCI is, here's the value of HCI to your environment. Today it's no longer like that, right? It's no longer in the corner with the lights blinking and "Hey let's not tell anybody we're doing this", it is much more adopted, it's embraced, it's something that people are building off of. And what we're seeing with our clients is we're seeing a continual, my environment is complex, I need something that doesn't just do VDI, but does beyond that, and I think, interestingly enough, Nutanix has grown up, if I may say that, in that, when we started we were, we were a VDI company, no more. You're expanding across all workloads. >> I have the folks at Sirius credit, because they continue to come up with innovative ways to apply our technology in different use cases, different customer types and industries, and they are bringing us a lot of new logos, because of that innovative approach, so they're a very valuable partner to us from that perspective, in that they're reaching customers that frankly our direct sales team couldn't reach with the bag of products they had to sell. They add value, they add innovation around our technology and then we're able to extend our reach into the market, leveraging Sirius. >> I'd like to go into the cloud conversation. So when I look at the channel, it was, sometimes there was fear at the beginning days, there were plenty that had Microsoft practices that have worked along those lines. Today, Amazon's working with them and of course Nutanix is expanding how it works in all of those environments. Deborah, if you could share, how does cloud fit into it? You know, kind of with and without Nutanix. >> I don't think you can leave this event without talking about cloud, right? In and of itself, so, Sirius believes and will continue to believe in a hybrid world, right? Hybrid IT, and I think cloud is an extremely important part of that conversation. I think where Nutanix is uniquely positioned is with their enterprise cloud, and what they've done with not being just a VDI solution set anymore, they can span, and help our customers share multiple workloads within a data center, as well as and or within the cloud set. So it's an extremely important part of where we are today, more importantly where we're going with cloud. 'Cause I don't think anybody has it all set with cloud, candidly. I think a lot of us are learning. But again, I think Nutanix is uniquely positioned today, for that. >> Yeah I agree with what Deb said that you hit on something that's come out very strongly at this conference, with some of our announcements around Beam and Era, and Flow, which is hybrid cloud. Customers have hybrid cloud environments that and we bring together that private cloud, and public cloud environment seamlessly, and now we provide some intelligence behind the decisions customers are making. How much is it really costing me to have a public cloud environment versus private cloud, and where will my workloads run more effectively and efficiently, at what cost? And this is going to be technology that Sirius will be able to leverage, not only to sell in the market, but also add value into their solutions around cloud. So, we're excited about being able to provide technology and tools that Sirius can use to extend their value proposition, to be more competitive in the market as well. >> And this is what Nutanix is doing so well to Rodney's point, they continue to innovate, right? Again, kind of what got them to where they are today is not going to be the same thing that kind of gets you to where you want to be as a company, and you continue to innovate, and we see that and we need that, because ultimately, at the end of the day, our respective, our bosses if you would are our clients, we have to make sure that we're making that complex environment less complex for them. And much more open. >> Yeah, I mean we're proud of being in that upper right in the magic quadrant, but let me tell you there's others that are in that magic quadrant behind us that want to take that spot back. And we know that, so we have to continue innovation at a very fast pace, which you're seeing from us, to continue to move hopefully in a whole nother zip code from our competitors, which our partners benefit from. And it allows them the freedom to sell more into the market, leveraging that innovation that we continue to drive and I don't see the rate and pace of that ending anytime soon. >> So Deborah let's talk a little bit about the value that Nutanix has brought with abstracting the software even further from the hardware, after Norr becoming a appliance company is now a software company. What flexibility does that give Sirius when it got to talk to customers, when it talked to platforms that Nutanix has partnerships with, and platforms that they support, but not naturally have partnerships with. What are those customer conversations like? >> Yeah, this is interesting, especially from a company that started in 1980. >> Rodney: We've had several conversations about this. >> Many conversations about this. Yeah well, I'm going to make it short though Rodney, how about that? But again when you take a look at our customer environment now, I mean, our job is to make sure that we're bringing best of breed technology. But more important, that it's open. And what's Nutanix brings to the table. It's an open environment, being able to utilize different technologies together to collaborate, I mean just take a look at the floor today. Who would've thought that IBM and Nutanix would be sitting at the same table? Truly, and I say that in a very positive way. It enables us to take, a great example is IBM and Nutanix, it enables us to take that strength, and that power of IBM power AIX, meld it with the Nutanix solution, being able to create a much more powerful and open environment forum. So it's being able to be agnostic and an integrator for our clients. >> I wonder if you can expand a little bit, the power one something that not everybody fully understands. It's often starting with a different set of applications, adding AIX into there, what are you hearing from customers, what's so attractive? >> So I think with the announcement this week I think it was a lot of discussion before kicking tires, I think what you're going to see in the 30 to 60 days are people are actually going to start allowing those conversations to go deeper and wider within their existing customer base. Because again, Sirius is privileged to have one of the largest, if not the largest in North America IBM power base. It enables us to go back in and have relevant conversations and say, "Let's get a little bit open, with Nutanix as a software". >> So Stu let's face it, not every customer of IBM has the latest power system. (all laughing) I mean, that's a fact. >> We've tried Rodney, we've tried. >> So that's opportunity for us, and I think the customers are going to be very excited about this offering, because they've not all upgraded, a lot of them have old, power sucking, you know, old power systems on AIX and they are welcoming this solution and opportunity to upgrade, and modernize their data centers, leveraging this offering and certainly Sirius is a long time top IBM partner, and those customers, IBM customers, look to Sirius for solutions, and look to Sirius to advance their infrastructure, modernize it, this is a great opportunity for both us, leveraging this announcement and what we're bringing out to the market with IBM. >> So outside of power, what's the exciting buzz at the show? What have customers, that you guys talk to, generally said, "You know what? We got to have this tomorrow". >> Right. >> So, I have to be selfish a little bit, I'll tell you that the buzz for us and the 54 team members that are here from Sirius, I would tell you I would be remiss not to thank you know, Rodney and Sherry and the rest of the executive team for recognizing Sirius as the US Partner Of The Year. That is quite a buzz, and one that we will continue to discuss throughout the show. I tell you that, for us right now, when we take a look at the most opportunistic way of going back into our client sets now and offering a solution, would be the IBM piece. The IBM power AIX announcement is probably one of the key opportunities for us to go back in and offer value to our client sets. That's probably the biggest, the buzz for us today. >> Yeah, and I tell you that, they should be very very proud of this award because one of the things I did, taking over the channel, and leading into this event, is we had a lot of awards before. I mean, it was like a nine year old soccer game. Everybody got a trophy. And I reduced the number of awards down significantly because I wanted more press coverage, I wanted more recognition, and I wanted it to mean something. So winning this award for Sirius, there was some tough competition, they're against some big partners, and Sirius really, you know, comes to the top of the heap, clearly with some of the investment and focus and what they're achieving in the market with us, so, it's no longer a nine year old soccer trophy, I mean they really accomplished something. Yeah in winning this award, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Rodney, so last thing I want to ask, it's competitive in the channel these days. >> It is, very. >> Sirius has a broad spectrum of partners, what do you want people to take away from the show about Nutanix's commitment to the channel? >> Well, we announced a new channel charter, okay, and I call it a channel charter on purpose as opposed to a channel program, for a reason, because it's different. It's not the same old channel program with platinum, bronze, and gold, and the tearing, and the same old thing, we have to differentiate ourself in the market from other channel programs. We are evolving as a company to be that provider of solutions in the multi cloud era. Which means you can't have the same old channel programs anymore, and deliver in that type of market and environment. So, I'm excited about the channel charter we've defined in our rolling out into the market, it is clearly different than any other provider, different than our competitors, and it's going to help our partners both large and small, to be effective in selling our solutions in the market with competitive rewards, and financial benefits as well as the ability to build skills, drive pipeline, across our ecosystem of partners that we have for Nutanix. So, I'm very excited about what we've announced, and I think it's going to differentiate us from the rest. >> Deborah, congratulations on the award. >> Deborah: Thank you very much. >> Rodney, thank you for all the updates, great to see you, you know, it's the technology, the channel, everything we're hearing here. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Deborah: Thanks for having us. Rodney, thank you. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in our Boston-area studio, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Brian Kelly, who's the Co-founder and CEO of CLoudGenera. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. >> Stu, thank you so much for having us here. >> All right, first of all Brian, we always love. We get you know a co-founder on the program, you got to bring us back to kind of the why. You know, why was CLoudGenera formed? We've had a chance to dig into it but CLoudGenera, there's cloud in the name, there's generation. Tell me about the company, the name, and a little bit about your background. >> Be glad to. So like most great companies, our company was born of the market's necessity. We saw trend happening as many businesses we're shifting the way they manage their IT and the trend took the form of this buzzword cloud. And so you know CLoudGenera as a company absolutely helps businesses figure out their most efficient path towards leveraging cloud technologies. But our value proposition is actually greater than that. Our business exists to help companies determine the best IT services to support the needs of their organization. >> Great. Well luckily cloud's simple. Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press, and everything works awesome. I think the reality is though, nobody ever gets rid of anything. Changing applications is really tough and it's a really complicated and super fast changing market out there. So maybe, drill in just a tiny bit and explain what it is that you do and why that's a little bit different than some of the other things happening in the marketplace. >> Sure. Well the big easy button does exist, when you push it nothing happens. Maybe it makes a funny sound. As the name would suggest, CLoudGenera specializes in the formation of clouds and to the point that you made, this is not simple, this is not easy. Cloud is not a target state. Unlike virtualization, which was a target state, cloud is really an operating model. And also as you highlighted, there's so much variability and complexity associated with cloud. Am i talking about infrastructure? Am i talking about platforms? Am i talking about software as a service? Cloud for us can be any of those things. It can be you managing your infrastructure. Can be somebody else managing your infrastructure, all the way up through your apps. And so what our business aims to do is to demystify all the variability and complexity associated with making cloud decisions. Really it's about helping people figure out where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is that the migration does not generate success unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads in advance of selecting a new execution venue. So as a business our software, our technology, helps customers to determine how do I optimize my workloads, regardless of whether or not I'm going to move them. And ultimately, how do I get the best value for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating cloud as a model for hosting my apps? >> Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there, if I'm a cloud platform vendor or if I'm an infrastructure vendor, they all have these tools that say hey, here's how the experience is going to be on our platform. Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there but you're not pushing hardware, you're not pushing platforms. Explain how you fit into kind of the ecosystem and you're not just, when you say cloud it's it's not just public cloud, it's you know, talk a little bit about the spectrum of things that you support. >> Okay, be happy to. So first, what I would say is that when you look at a vendor strategy, their strategy is to drive you to adopt their technologies, their solutions. And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market, any of the services that they're bringing to market, are biased towards the outcome that they're trying to achieve. This was actually when I say CLoudGenera was born of the market's necessity, the market really needed a solution that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome. Something that would be so bold is to recommend not doing anything if that was the best option available to your business. That's really what makes CLoudGenera special. We are the best place to go in the market to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint that's tailored to your needs as an organization and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions. >> Yeah. It's interesting you think about like there's consulting companies that would get involved and send a bunch of people and help you through your journey. We talked about there's been lots of tools out that have poked at this but there's a big elephant in the room and it's a little tough to kind of figure out where to start. So I just want to, talk a little bit about kind of the breadth and depth of what you do. How do you keep up with all of these things? I mean, while we were talking I'm pretty sure Amazon released one or two new features. And the next time Intel comes out with a spin, you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update. So how does this impact you and how do you help keep up with it? >> So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity and value proposition for my business. The market is changing at breakneck speed. To your point, the major providers both in data center as well as in cloud have probably released a half a dozen new services for the market to contemplate just in our conversation. So CLoudGenera addresses this in a couple of different ways. But all of it born in automation and intelligence. And so we have a cloud research function as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting the data around what the market can offer. So this could be services you could consume from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure, the Amazon EC2, the Google Compute as an example, but we're not an infrastructure play. We actually move up and down the stack. So if you want to look at platform as a service solution like Cloud Foundry as an example, you're moving towards no SQL, as an example, for managing data. Do I do that is infrastructure? Do I do it as a platform, as a service? Right, what level of service is available in the market? Our automation, our intelligence, gathering that market data is the big value for our customers because through that automation we give them something that have avoids their need to spend a lot of money on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally trying to assess what the market can offer. And then most importantly once you have that data, how do you turn it into insights? How do you take that data and make it actionable for your business based upon your needs and the requirements of your workloads? So that that's a big part of our secret sauce. A big part of our IP. We stay current with the market so that you don't have to. And what's interesting about our business is that we don't just do point in time comparisons. In fact, we sit on historical data and trends, both how you can modernize in your data center and how you can leverage cloud services and that data set is over four years large, I like to say, not four years old. And so in that way we can even predict where the market is headed so if you're if you're leveraging us or doing this manual as opposed to leveraging our automated methods, we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions and really it is staying current on the market. That's the only way that that you can address it. Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked, which is consultancies. If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market, it is the ability to do this analysis at scale. Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive to hire an army of consultants to come in and assess their current capabilities and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer. If you're using a manual method powered by labor, you're likely going to have an answer that reflects the market ninety days ago, 180 days ago. CLoudGenera gives you the power at your fingertips to get those sort of insights immediately. And when I talk about disruption, it's really doing in minutes what normally took months. it's also a fraction of the cost, Both productivity and labor as well as the true costs if you're leveraging consultants to do this sort of analysis. and so in that way we can scale to servinG customers that are as large and as complicated as the Global Five. We can also scale far and wide to serve many customers in the market at the same time. Again, it's because we're using algorithms. We're using data science. We're not trying to solve this problem with labor. >> Yeah, I love that and you talked about, it's not just about the platform, you're looking at what we've said for years. Customers need to look at their data, they need to look at their applications, and that's where you need to start. I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users because you know, talked to so many companies, it's like oh, they've tried either building their own in-house solution or going to a service provider or going to a public cloud and they get one or two apps. Some critical one or some real important or some cool new one and then they're like okay, I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps and trying to figure out how they do that, you got to use some intelligence. You need to use some, you know, it needs to be driven by software. It can't be some big process that I'd have some consultancy or a thing like that. Do you have some customer examples you can bring us through or talk to how that typically works? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market. One pattern and it doesn't have a bias towards a particular industry vertical or a particular size of customer. But there's an illusion out there in the market that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload from your data center to Amazon's data center, as an example, and then magically that's going to take care of all your problems. Amazon's going to manage your mess for less. Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding is that while Amazon, as an example, might be an excellent provider of IT services for your business, if you're not optimizing your workload to leverage that provider, you're not going to get the benefits that you'd hope. And so one trend we see commonly in the industry and it's a mistake we hope folks make, whether they leverage our service or they solve this problem some other way, is you know please don't try to do the lift and shift. In fact, another big trend we see in the industry of companies that have gone that route is they do what we like to call repatriation. Where they made the full-fledged push into migrating their workloads to a new venue and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift was not successful for them. And the larger the client, the more pain they've experienced because the more money they're spending on IT and the harder that gets. >> Just to poke at that a tiny bit and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it but it's if you lift and shift and that's the step one of doing, I need to break something apart, I want to refactor some pieces, and eventually know I'll get there. But is that okay and are there paths to get there? Or are you saying hey, you want to sort those pieces out first before you get to the cloud? >> There's some use cases where lift and shift absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value. If you're dedicating IT capacity and it's dedicated towards something that's used sporadically, well just the usage model alone, you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift. You're getting the benefit of the optimization just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud. But beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases, we actually see this as a detriment to many company's success. I like to use the analogy of a moving company. The last thing you want to do is pack the box, pick up the box, move the box, and then move it three or four times before you actually get to the destination. That's what lift and shift is really doing. You just pick up what you had in your data center, you put it in somebody else's data center, and now you're in a foreign land and you're going to try to break that thing apart and re-engineer it there. That's actually going to be a lot harder in practice than what we've seen as more of a better option, which is optimized where you are. If you're if your target state for the next innovation is to get to containers, figure out how to containerize before you make the migration as an example. If your endgame is to move from a database on infrastructure to a platform as-a-service, well optimized that databases deployment, optimize that workload before you attempt to transition it to the path. So I would say nine times out of ten, you're probably going to want to treat an application workload before you attempt to move it someplace else. Otherwise, you're just going to be lifting and carrying that box several times. >> Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of anybody that's moved and you know, you move someplace and three to five years later you run across that box and you're like why did I even move this to my environment. I've outgrown it, I don't need it. I could have either gotten rid of it or done something else with it. Last piece of the technology I want to cover for today is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud, you do a lot with service providers and with the in-house data center stuff. Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover. Public clouds, there's a few really big ones but there's so many service providers. What do you engage with? What do you cover there and in the data center there's just, I can't imagine how many options there are. What's the scope of what you cover? >> So this might be a little controversial for some folks because if you read the the trade rags, cloud is the answer. Whatever cloud may be, moving to cloud is the answer. Our philosophy as a company is that public cloud is not the only game in town, nor will it be the only game in town in the future. We believe in companies investing in technology to get the best value for their spend. And as a result there's a continuum of options that we see existing far into the future and those include regional data center providers. Frequently we see them being value-added because they can offer a level of service that's not yet been implemented in public cloud. Who's going to manage the stuff that an Azure doesn't manage, as an example. These regional providers, these service providers, many of whom are evolving to do managed services and other people's data centers, not just their own, are going to play a key role in this next wave of technology. And so again, these regional providers, we see them being very important for delivering the service level that customers expect. There's also and this is a very prominent topic right now, there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty. While the hyper scalars have done a great job of building a global footprint, they still have gaps. And so if companies are concerned about GDPR in Europe, as an example. If they're concerned about PIPEDA up in Canada, as an example. These regional service providers have the compliance capabilities, they have the protection already in place to not just deliver a high service level but also to deliver a solution that can be lower risk for your business. And so that's really where we see service providers fitting in the market and we see customers having the right mix of public cloud and service provider powered infrastructure. As well as for large companies, they may still have the buying power, and they may still have the level of expertise in house, so like my Fortune 50 clientele but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500. Where it's more cost-effective for them to still operate in their data center. Today, because we're a data-driven company and we live in the data and the insights it provides, still the majority of the workloads, either for service level security or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT are still better suited in data center. We don't know that it's always going to be the majority in your data center. We see this evolving as the public cloud providers continue to mature, over the last few years they've matured greatly. But again, we see a continuum of options for customers to consider. We think those options will get smaller but we still think you're going to have a purpose to consider in your data center, in a regional service provider, as well as considering a hyper scalar for your needs. >> All right. Brian, last thing. Need to get speeds and feeds on CLoudGenera. How many employees you have, how many customers you have. Can talk anything about the funding? And tell us about this looking south. >> The Silicon South. Well, let me start there. One of the things we're very proud about is being a company that's headquartered here on the East Coast and specifically in the South. That said, we're already a global company. We have customers around the world. There's well over a thousand subscribers of our cloud assist technology, which is where you can both model future uses of technology as well as load in your existing inventories and analyze your business at scale. What I would share again about the Silicon South is that we're one of these cool companies that is helping the southeast kind of rise up as a technology center. Not one of the normal places that folks think of as innovation hubs but very much in the Carolinas in particular, we have a market that's on the rise with very smart data scientists, very smart developers, and very strong business leaders. And so that's one of the things we are very proud of as a company. There are 22 employees in CLoudGenera today. As I mentioned, we have a global footprint in terms of customers. I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product. One of the cool things about us is that we serve both the consumer, so that would be the enterprise that's trying to figure out what to do with their technology investments. We also serve their suppliers. We will not bias ourselves so they can't bias the output of our software but what they can do is leverage our software to guide their customers decisions. In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are relationships where they know sometimes our software will recommend an outcome that they can't monetize but they still choose to work with us and they still choose to recommend us and in some cases, leverage us for their clients to make sure their clients are getting the best value for their spent. >> Well, Brian Kelly, Charlotte North Carolina based CLoudGenera. Appreciate you joining. Thanks so much for sharing with us some of the nuance and complexity that you're trying to help enterprises glean through. We'll be back. Check out lots more coverage at theCUBE.net. So many shows where companies are trying to sort through this very complicated space. So be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the videos. Wikibon.com where we're digging through with our analysis on our team. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)